The present disclosure relates generally to address space communications and, in particular, to methods, systems, and computer program products for implementing inter-process integrity serialization for establishing a level of trust between processes.
Applications that span multiple processes are sometimes required to exchange sensitive data and/or provide a set of authorized commands that can be requested of one another. A problem arises when one of the processes in an application has errantly loaded a program from a non-protected library. Once one process in the application loses integrity, the entire application may no longer be secure thereby placing sensitive data at risk. An example of this is a daemon process (e.g., a parent process) of a login application that creates a child process that will act on behalf of a client. The child process executes authorized client code that will then start an exchange of information with its parent (e.g., the daemon process). In the course of events, the child process inadvertently loads an executable program from a non-controlled library and becomes infected. The daemon parent process continues to accept requests from the infected child process thereby leading to a possible breach of security.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to establish trust between processes that endures for the life of the processes when one or more of these processes require the exchange of sensitive data.